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Simulators and "rule engines" to make legislation accessible to citizens

Published on 13 February 2020
Update on 26 September 2022
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Summary

"We are governed by rules. These rules take the form of a law, a decree, an internal administrative circular, or even customs. Their role is to inform us in a complete manner - all cases must be considered - of our rights and obligations: the taxes we must pay, the social assistance to which we are entitled, the amount of social contributions an employee must pay, etc. But the rules that make up legislation are rarely easy to understand, let alone to implement. (...) As a direct consequence, there is a lack of access to the law, or to many forms of assistance that citizens are not aware of. As well as the profusion of competing services that "reinvent the wheel" to implement these rules and some of which - private sites - even charge a commission to help users benefit from aid".

The OECD considers writing the rules of legislation in computer code to be one of the most important innovations in modernizing government.

The rules of legislation, when written in computer code, become accessible to users through simulators, "rule engines" and data exchanges.

beta.gouv.frOpenFisca, the network of incubators of digital public services of the State and territories, has undertaken to develop several products whose common point is to encode the rules of the legislation in computer code, to restore them to users in an understandable format.OpenFisca is a free and open calculation engine that allows to model the socio-fiscal system in a collaborative and transparent way. It allows to calculate a large number of social deductions, social benefits and taxes, and to simulate the impact of reforms on these amounts. OpenFisca It also exposes all the reference values of the legislation (tax brackets, amount of the minimum wage...), with a historical coverage that can be counted in decades. This software is used by economic researchers and public services such as mes-aides.gouv.fr, embauche.beta.gouv.fr or mesdroitssociaux.gouv.fr.Clara: Today, between the time a scheme is created, for example a regional vocational training aid, and the time the information is known to the target audience, several weeks or even months can pass during which the scheme has zero impact. Even after it is made official, the information may remain confidential, written on a memo or a poster in the corridors of an administration. The state-owned startup Clara has "codified" social aid in an online simulator, allowing hundreds of thousands of jobseekers to find out if they are eligible for aid and to mobilize it to find a job or training faster. Clara is now part of the tools offered by Pole Emploi for discover the aids and measures that will accelerate the return to workDigital labor code: Today, only an expert audience masters the complexity of labor law and its various sources (labor code, collective agreements, company agreements, etc.). The technical nature of the subject also makes it not very accessible for employees and employers. However, the law is all the more easily applied and respected when it is known and understood. Officially opened to the public on January 1, 2020, Digital labor codee gathers different contents on labor law: generic answers on labor law in an accessible language, personalized answers according to the collective agreement, simulators allowing to estimate notice periods, indemnity amounts, as well as letter templates.MonEntreprise: Creating a company without prior training or support is a real obstacle course. The creator must declare his activity and make sure that it is in conformity with the law. It is necessary to inform oneself about a lot of parameters to be sure to make the right choice, the legal statutes (SAS, SARL, EURL, auto-entreprise...) and their link with the social protection regime, the differences between the social protection regimes (micro-BNC / micro-BIC / BNC / BIC), the difference between IS and IR, the VAT taxation regimes, the conditions of application of the "flat tax", or the differences in the functioning of the collection of the social contributions between self-employed persons and assimilated employees. Once the company is up and running, tax and accounting deadlines punctuate the year, such as VAT, the annual balance sheet, social security contributions, the CFE, the apprenticeship tax and the professional training contribution.

Developed in close collaboration with the URSSAF network, the site mon-entreprise.fr now allows to accompany these new leaders in the creation of their company.

First lessons and points of vigilance

In a post published on its blog, the Beta.gouv.fr team shares the first lessons learned from these projects. It identifies, in particular, three points of vigilance:
  • " Apply a computer logic to all legislation. Some aspects of legislation describe prescriptive rules, which can be easily translated into computer code according to a logic made of eligibility criteria ("if I am less than 20 years old, I live in a town and I have been unemployed for xx months, then I am eligible for xx"). This is the case for taxes, social benefits, retirement. For other rules, which cannot be quantified or are more dependent on interpretation, such as court decisions, the translation into computer code is less obvious. The bias of beta.gouv.fr is to focus on the former, and in all cases to return the information to users by publishing the entire source code in open source, so that it can be consulted, questioned and improved by all users .
  • "Breaking the promise of comprehensiveness, forgetting a rule. By centralizing all the rules of the legislation, as well as their conditions of applicability to make them accessible to users, one creates a promise that must be kept. In other words, when information was not available, nobody complained about its accuracy! With online simulators, the user is rightly becoming more demanding. The updating and exhaustiveness of the rules is a new and permanent point of attention for the teams that create these services. There is no miracle recipe, except to be transparent with users about the scope of the available information and to listen to them about possible errors. The MyHelp site allows users who have doubts about the accuracy of a simulation to contact the team or report a potential error that will be used to continuously improve the simulator.
  • Systematically "disintermediate". The dissemination of rules through general public interfaces encourages direct access of users to their rights, which could lead to the neglect of the valuable role of certain mediators. In reality, we observe that with the development of these tools, agents and mediators have more time to solve complex problems of users, which are not answered today, while the users themselves get information on the basic cases".

Référence :

Sources

Simulators and "rule engines" to make legislation accessible to citizens

"We are governed by rules. These rules take the form of a law, a decree, an internal administrative circular, or even customs. Their role is to inform us in a complete manner - all cases must be considered - of our rights and obligations: the taxes we must pay, the social assistance to which we are entitled, the amount of social contributions an employee must pay, etc. But the rules that make up legislation are rarely easy to understand, let alone to implement. (...) As a direct consequence, there is a lack of access to the law, or to many forms of assistance that citizens are not aware of. As well as the profusion of competing services that "reinvent the wheel" to implement these rules and some of which - private sites - even charge a commission to help users benefit from aid".

The OECD considers writing the rules of legislation in computer code to be one of the most important innovations in modernizing government.

The rules of legislation, when written in computer code, become accessible to users through simulators, "rule engines" and data exchanges.

beta.gouv.frOpenFisca, the network of incubators of digital public services of the State and territories, has undertaken to develop several products whose common point is to encode the rules of the legislation in computer code, to restore them to users in an understandable format.OpenFisca is a free and open calculation engine that allows to model the socio-fiscal system in a collaborative and transparent way. It allows to calculate a large number of social deductions, social benefits and taxes, and to simulate the impact of reforms on these amounts. OpenFisca It also exposes all the reference values of the legislation (tax brackets, amount of the minimum wage...), with a historical coverage that can be counted in decades. This software is used by economic researchers and public services such as mes-aides.gouv.fr, embauche.beta.gouv.fr or mesdroitssociaux.gouv.fr.Clara: Today, between the time a scheme is created, for example a regional vocational training aid, and the time the information is known to the target audience, several weeks or even months can pass during which the scheme has zero impact. Even after it is made official, the information may remain confidential, written on a memo or a poster in the corridors of an administration. The state-owned startup Clara has "codified" social aid in an online simulator, allowing hundreds of thousands of jobseekers to find out if they are eligible for aid and to mobilize it to find a job or training faster. Clara is now part of the tools offered by Pole Emploi for discover the aids and measures that will accelerate the return to workDigital labor code: Today, only an expert audience masters the complexity of labor law and its various sources (labor code, collective agreements, company agreements, etc.). The technical nature of the subject also makes it not very accessible for employees and employers. However, the law is all the more easily applied and respected when it is known and understood. Officially opened to the public on January 1, 2020, Digital labor codee gathers different contents on labor law: generic answers on labor law in an accessible language, personalized answers according to the collective agreement, simulators allowing to estimate notice periods, indemnity amounts, as well as letter templates.MonEntreprise: Creating a company without prior training or support is a real obstacle course. The creator must declare his activity and make sure that it is in conformity with the law. It is necessary to inform oneself about a lot of parameters to be sure to make the right choice, the legal statutes (SAS, SARL, EURL, auto-entreprise...) and their link with the social protection regime, the differences between the social protection regimes (micro-BNC / micro-BIC / BNC / BIC), the difference between IS and IR, the VAT taxation regimes, the conditions of application of the "flat tax", or the differences in the functioning of the collection of the social contributions between self-employed persons and assimilated employees. Once the company is up and running, tax and accounting deadlines punctuate the year, such as VAT, the annual balance sheet, social security contributions, the CFE, the apprenticeship tax and the professional training contribution.

Developed in close collaboration with the URSSAF network, the site mon-entreprise.fr now allows to accompany these new leaders in the creation of their company.

First lessons and points of vigilance

In a post published on its blog, the Beta.gouv.fr team shares the first lessons learned from these projects. It identifies, in particular, three points of vigilance:
  • " Apply a computer logic to all legislation. Some aspects of legislation describe prescriptive rules, which can be easily translated into computer code according to a logic made of eligibility criteria ("if I am less than 20 years old, I live in a town and I have been unemployed for xx months, then I am eligible for xx"). This is the case for taxes, social benefits, retirement. For other rules, which cannot be quantified or are more dependent on interpretation, such as court decisions, the translation into computer code is less obvious. The bias of beta.gouv.fr is to focus on the former, and in all cases to return the information to users by publishing the entire source code in open source, so that it can be consulted, questioned and improved by all users .
  • "Breaking the promise of comprehensiveness, forgetting a rule. By centralizing all the rules of the legislation, as well as their conditions of applicability to make them accessible to users, one creates a promise that must be kept. In other words, when information was not available, nobody complained about its accuracy! With online simulators, the user is rightly becoming more demanding. The updating and exhaustiveness of the rules is a new and permanent point of attention for the teams that create these services. There is no miracle recipe, except to be transparent with users about the scope of the available information and to listen to them about possible errors. The MyHelp site allows users who have doubts about the accuracy of a simulation to contact the team or report a potential error that will be used to continuously improve the simulator.
  • Systematically "disintermediate". The dissemination of rules through general public interfaces encourages direct access of users to their rights, which could lead to the neglect of the valuable role of certain mediators. In reality, we observe that with the development of these tools, agents and mediators have more time to solve complex problems of users, which are not answered today, while the users themselves get information on the basic cases".

Référence :

Sources

Labo Société Numérique

Labo République Française Agence nationale de cohésion des territoires
Simulators and "rule engines" to make legislation accessible to citizens